Just yesterday, I happened to have a look at the shopping cart checkout process of a famous B to C multinational brand in Japan. The Website looks great and they offer huge number of products to their retail customers. However they have got some massive problems with shopping cat process without solving which they can not maximize their sale revenue from the website.
Following is a list of the problem areas I noticed on their website. You will surely find some of the issue your own website may be having. Solving these and other issues will boost your revenue online.
- Provide a detailed description of the item in question
- Provide various images of the product you are trying to sell me. These images should be of sufficient sizes taken from various angles for me to get a clearer idea of how the product looks like
- Take all the clutter away from the detailed description page of the product. Let me focus on the checkout process instead of looking at the search button, your company information, other offers from other websites etc.
- Provide your visitor an opportunity to change the size and/or the color of the product on her way to final checkout
- Give your customer a chance to go through the checkout process first before you ask them to register on your website or sign in if they are a repeat visitor or customer. Do not force them to register in the beginning of the process
- Try to squeeze the checkout process into one single page if possible. I, as your website visitor do not have the patience to go through 10 pages of the process.
- If you can not squeeze the process into one page, at least give me an indication of where am I in the process by showing a moving indicator on the top of the page
- Do not ask or expect me to give you my credit card details especially if you are a new Website. Instead provide me alternative ways to pay you such as Pay pal
- Ask your designer to give a consistent look and feel to your shopping cart pages. The overall colors and fonts etc. of the process should match with that of the overall website pages. This is especially important if you are using a third party shopping cart system
- Remove unnecessary fields from the checkout form
- Use appropriate space, legible font, alignment etc. throughout the shopping cart pages
- Use a light background to distinguish the form from other elements on the page so that the customer could really focus on completing the process instead of wandering here and there on the site
- Provide help, telephone number and FAQ pages handy at the customer disposal so that they could contact you if in any doubt while entering the necessary details
- Provide security assurances to indicate that shopping on your website is safe
- Help visitors remember what is in the cart they had originally put into the shopping cart before they started browsing some other pages or sites. This could be done by giving a thumbnail image of the product(s) in question
- Make the item titles very clear, easy to read format
- Give a consistent look and feel to the various buttons on the shopping cart pages
- Do not make your customers struggle to find the buttons I need to click on to complete the process
We will be happy to give advice on a specific chopping cart page. Please feel free to comment in the following lines.
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